All human knowledge is there

I just love how much stuff is accessible online nowadays. I’m old enough that when I started my scientific career, reading a paper meant walking over to the library and looking up the actual physical paper in leather-bound volumes! I haven’t done that this millennium… it makes me feel ancient to think of it.

And increasingly, out-of-copyright texts are being digitised, so if I come across a reference to a nineteenth-century German work, I can probably now find it in an American library somewhere and read it myself. Or, let’s face it, use the fact that it’s digital to search it for keywords rather than reading all 200 densely-written pages. Even if I only skim, I feel so much more in touch with my scientific heritage now that I can go back to the original texts myself rather than relying on what I read in textbooks. What a fantastic development.

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